bossdjfargo

From a designer standpoint, I like the colors and vintage look but there's way too much text and the fonts are overused. The art looks like clipart you download for free from Microsoft. But maybe that adds to the charm?

zealouselixir

It appears to be Helvetica. Note that the terminals of the 'S' character are perfectly horizontal, while in Arial the upper terminal would be slightly tilted. Helvetica was introduced in 1957, and the floppy was introduced while Helvetica was on the ascendancy in advertising for its bold, legible character. You're right, though, in noting that Arial was first made available in 1982.

grahamcrackercoyote

mypinktoes wrote:Oh dear, now you're making me feel reallly old. I remember writing my first programs in Basic: writing them in pencil in a spiral notebook first and then TYPING THEM IN BY HAND on my friend's TRS-80 each time we turned the machine on. (it was a choose-your-own-adventure story and it took about 45 minutes to type in). When she got a CASSETTE TAPE storage option, we felt like we were amazing.

Yeah, I know - we also walked to school in the snow uphill both ways..... *sigh* I teach school and my current 7th graders didn't know life before flash drives. I remember when my Zip drive DOUBLED the memory on my Powerbook. Ok, I'll stop now and give the thread back to you whippersnappers.

tl;dr: this was my vote in the derby, I'm thrilled to see it print, and I'm in for 1 today (and probably another next week!)

I did walk through the snow uphill both ways in the '70s - I lived in a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania where the shortest route to my high school was through a wooded hill [developed my senior year] - up from my house and then down into the high school. AND I learned to program the first time [and the second time] on punch cards I'm a 59-er [Late Baby Boomer].

hamjudo

I worked on an old IBM mainframe computer in 1987. It was powered up rarely, to test and maintain one program. Most of the time, it wasn't even turned on. The mainframe was just old, some of the peripherals were truly ancient. In particular, there was this one huge metal box. This box was from the era, when IBM made all of their cabinets so they just barely fit into the smallest common freight elevator.

This box was a disk controller. It was connected to the mainframe via the "channel interface". The disk drives it controlled were the washing machine sized thingies with the cake platter disks. They were newer than the controller, so they were on the order of 80Mbytes.

The controller had a stupid little processor of its own, so it could manage the conversations between the disk drives and the mainframe channel interface. This stupid little processor needed to load its software from somewhere.

The hard disk controller booted from the read only floppy disk drive, hidden in the cabinet. Once the controller finished booting, it turned off the floppy disk drive. It wouldn't access it again until the next boot. It had no need to write stuff to the floppy, because once it was up and running, it could save data to the big disk drives.

We had some spare parts. The data cables were about an inch in diameter. We had some that were the maximum safe length for one person to install. That is to say, the cables were 60 pounds each. If it was any longer, and therefore any heavier, OSHA rules required two people to lift it. The computer was in a machine room with raised floors. The huge cables ran under the floor between the cabinets.

The controller cabinet was mostly empty, but it looked impressive from the outside. When you bought hardware from IBM in the early 1970s, you got your money's worth (edit: or at least it looked that way. The thing cost more than a nice car).

It looked like cardboard to me. This wasn't one of those modern floppies like we had in 1975, that was used for saving and transporting data, this was just used for booting the peripherals. Something that happened once every few months, or less.

---
[Edit: Since this is now a quality post, I thought I should fix up the low quality grammar.]

poohgirl4055

Many years ago when my dad closed his computer business, I found a stash of 8 inch floppies in their own plastic storage case while helping him clear out. This was back when CDs were starting to take off. I thought they looked like 5 inch floppies on steroids.

And now we're using micro SDs XD

This shirt is brilliant. Will definitely be in for 3. I have so many nerds in my life!

hamjudo

Forgot to mention... In 1979, I went to college. The University had an RJE station that loaded its firmware from a deck of punched cards. Or rather, it would have loaded the software that way, if they still used it. When I saw it, it was a pile of junk in the basement.

Booting off of an 8 inch read only floppy, is a vast improvement over booting off of a stack of punched cards that was six inches tall.

zollars23

phonedog365 wrote:Understood but stating "Read-only" and "Storage" in the same clause is an oxymoron, isn't it?

Unless it's supposed to be clever. Hmm.

Nope. The data is still stored, you just can't add to it. If you buy a blu-ray of a movie, the movie is still "stored" on the disc, but you can't add your clever mashup of My Little Pony and Thundercats.

techboysf

Except that I don't have the game anymore. Or a 1541 Floppy Drive anymore. Or a Commodore 64.

(sigh)

"Impossible Mission" was so awesome! And I'm in the same boat, no idea what happened to my 64 or 1541. I think my dad sold them while I was away at college. My fave game was "Paradroid"--there's a PC port, but I couldn't get it to work right.

waveformblue

As an "old timer"... I remember the first PCs...having TWO floppy drives was an upgrade and a big deal. You could read your program AND write your data! Floppies being one sided. the notching punch to make them writable. the foil tape/tab to make them read only. making single sided disks "dual sided" by cutting out the backside... ah, the days. For those who quote audio cassettes... those came later in the commodore/amiga/TRaSh-80 days.
It is with fond memories and great frustration that I recall the punchcards of yore... I bid them farewell back with COBOL and FORTRAN and Assembler...

poindexterturbo

basfiji wrote:How did this get voted and picked with errors in the text. Really cardboard. Man just fix the text please so I can buy one, I cannot go around with such a lie on my chest.

However the concept and design is awesome, so I might just buy one and write over it.

Let's all take a field trip to The National Museum of Computing.

"In a maze of rooms and corridors, visitors make a journey through the history of electronics, from slide rules via early calculators, analogue modems and large cardboard-encased ‘floppy’ disks, through supercomputers and mainframes half the size of the room, to the development of business PCs, Palms and early laptops."

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